My Cousin Rachel 3 страница

Or yet again, the whole thing might be an error, the letters scribbled as a crazy jest, one of those leg-pulls loved by Ambrose in days gone by, when as a child I would fall into some trap he set for me. And I might go now to seek him at the villa and find some celebration, dinner in progress, guests invited, lights and music; and I would be shown in upon the company with no excuse to offer, Ambrose in good health turning astounded eyes upon me.

I went downstairs and out into the square. The carroz-zas that had been waiting there had driven off. The siesta hour was over, and the streets were crowded once again. I plunged into them and was lost at once. About me were dark courts and alleyways, tall houses touching one another, jutting balconies, and as I walked, and turned, and walked again, faces peered at me from the doorways, passing figures paused and stared, all wearing upon them that same age-old look of suffering and passion long since spent which I had first noticed on the beggar girl. Some of them followed me, whispering as she had done, stretching out their hands, and when I spoke roughly, remembering my fellow passenger from the coach, they drew back again, flattening themselves against the walls of the tall houses, and watched me pass on, with a strange smouldering pride. The church bells began to clamour once again,'and I came to a great piazza where the people stood thickly, clustered together in groups, talking, gesticulating, having, so it seemed to my alien eyes, no connection with the buildings fringing the square, austere and beautiful, nor with the statues remotely staring with blind eyes upon them, nor with the sound of the bells themselves, echoing loud and fateful to the sky.

I hailed a passing carrozza, and when I said doubtfully the words "Villa Sangalletti" the driver answered something which I could not understand, but I caught the word "Fiesole" as he nodded and pointed with his whip. We drove through the narrow crowded streets, and he shouted to the horse, the reins jingling, the people falling back from us as we passed amongst them. The bells ceased and died away, yet the echo seemed to sound still in my ears, solemn, sonorous, tolling not for my mission, insignificant and small, nor for the lives of the people in the streets, but for the souls of men and women long since dead, and for eternity.

We climbed a long twisting road towards the distant hills, and Florence lay behind us. The buildings fell away.

It was peaceful, silent, and the hot staring sun that had beaten down upon the city all day, glazing the sky, turned gentle suddenly, and soft. The glare was gone. The yellow houses and the yellow walls, even the brown dust itself, were not so parched as they had been before. Colour came back to the houses, faded perhaps, subdued, but with an afterglow more tender now that the full force of the sun was spent. Cypress trees, shrouded and still, turned inky green.

The driver drew up his carrozza before a closed gate set in a long high wall. He turned in his seat and looked down at me over his shoulder. "Villa Sangalletti," he said. The end of my journey.

I made signs to him to wait and, getting out, walked up to the gate and pulled at the bell that hung there on the wall. I could hear it jangle from within. My driver coaxed his horse into the side of the road and, climbing from his seat, stood by the ditch, waving the flies away from his face with his hat. The horse drooped, poor half-starved brute, between his shafts; he had not spirit enough after his climb to crop the wayside, and dozed, with twitching ears. There was no sound from within the gate, and I rang the bell again. This time there was a muffled barking of a dog, becoming suddenly louder as some door was opened; the fretful cry of a child was hushed shrilly, with irritation, by a woman's voice, and I could hear footsteps approaching the gate from the other side. There was a heavy dragging sound of bolts being withdrawn, and then the grind of the gate itself as it scraped the stone beneath and was opened. A peasant woman stood peering at me. Advancing upon her, I said: "Villa Sangalletti. Signor Ashley?"

The dog, chained inside the lodge where the woman lived, barked more furiously than before. An avenue stretched in front of me, and at the far end I could see the villa itself, shuttered and lifeless. The woman made as though to shut the gate against me, as the dog continued barking and the child cried. Her face was puffed and swollen on one side, as though with toothache, and she kept the fringe of her shawl to it to ease the pain.

I pushed past her through the gate and repeated the words "Signer Ashley." This time she started, as though for the first time she saw my features, and began to talk rapidly, with a sort of nervous agitation, gesturing with her hands towards the villa. Then she turned swiftly and called over her shoulder towards the lodge. A man, presumably her husband, appeared it the open door, a child on his shoulder. He silenced the dog and came towards me, questioning his wife. She continued her torrent of words to him, and I caught the word "Ashley," and then "Inglese," and now it was his turn to stand and stare at me. He looked a better type than the woman, cleaner, with honest eyes, and as he stared at me an expression of deep concern came upon his face and he murmured a few words to his wife, who withdrew with the child to the entrance of the lodge and stood watching us, her shawl still held to her swollen face.

"I speak a little English, signore," he said. "Can I help you?"

"I have come to see Mr. Ashley," I said. "Are he and Mrs. Ashley at the villa?"

The concern on his face became greater. He swallowed nervously. "You are Mr. Ashley's son, signore?" he said.

"No," I said impatiently, "his cousin. Are they at home?"

He shook his head, distressed. "You have come from England, then, signore, and have not heard the news? What can I say? It is very sad, I do not know what to say. Signer Ashley, he died three weeks ago. Very sudden. Very sad. As soon as he is buried, the contessa, she shut up the villa, she went away. Nearly two weeks she has been gone. We do not know if she will come back again."

The dog began to bark again and he turned to quieten it.

I felt all the colour drain away from my face. I stood there, stunned. The man watched me in sympathy and said something to his wife, who dragged forward a stool, and he placed it beside me.

"Sit, signore," he said. "I am sorry. So very sorry."

I shook my head. I could not speak. There was nothing I could say. The man, distressed, spoke roughly to his wife to relieve his feelings. Then he turned again to me. "Signore," he said, "if you would like to go to the villa I will open it for you. You can see where the Signor Ashley died." I did not care where I went or what I did. My mind was still too numbed to concentrate. He began to walk up the drive, drawing some keys from his pocket, and I walked beside him, my legs heavy suddenly, like lead. The woman and the child followed behind us.

The cypress trees closed in upon us, and the shuttered villa, like a sepulchre, waited at the further end. As we drew closer I saw that it was large, with many windows, all of them blank and closed, and before the entrance the drive swept in a circle, for carriages to turn. Statues on their pedestals stood between the shrouded cypresses. The man opened the huge door with his key and motioned me inside. The woman and the child came too, and the pair of them began to fling open the shutters, letting the daylight into the silent hall. They went before me, passing from room to room, opening the shutters as they did so, believing, in the goodness of their hearts, that by doing this they somehow eased my pain. The rooms all led into each other, large and sparse, with frescoed ceilings and stone floors, and the air was heavy with a medieval musty smell. In some of the rooms the walls were plain, in others tapestried, and in one, darker and more oppressive than the rest, there was a long refectory table flanked with carved monastic chairs, and great wrought-iron candlesticks stood on either end.

"The Villa Sangalletti very beautiful, signore, very old," said the man. "The Signor Ashley, this is where he would sit when the sun was too strong for him outside. This was his chair."

He pointed, almost with reverence, to a tall high-backed chair beside the table. I watched him in a dream. None of this held reality. I could not see Ambrose in this house, or in this room. He could never have walked here with familiar tread, whistling, talking, throwing his stick down beside this chair, this table. Relentlessly, monotonously, the pair went round the room, throwing wide the shutters. Outside was a little court, a sort of cloistered quadrangle, open to the sky but shaded from the sun. In the centre of the court stood a fountain and the bronze statue of a boy holding a shell in his two hands. Beyond the fountain a laburnum tree grew between the paving stones, making its own canopy of shade. The golden flowers had long since drooped and died, and now the pods lay scattered on the ground, dusty and grey. The man whispered to the woman, and she went to a corner of the quadrangle and turned a handle. Slowly, gently, the water trickled from the shell between the bronze boy's hands. It fell down and splashed into the pool beneath.

"The Signer Ashley," said the man, "he sat here every day, watching the fountain. He liked to see the water. He sat there under the tree. It is very beautiful in spring. The contessa, she would call down to him from her room above."

He pointed to the stone columns of the balustrade. The woman disappeared within the house, and after a moment or two appeared on the balcony where he had pointed, having thrown open the shutters of the room. The water went on dripping from the shell. Never fast, never flowing, just splashing softly into the little pool.

"In summer, always they sit here," went on the man, "Signor Ashley and the contessa. They take their meals, they hear the fountain play. I wait upon them, you understand. I bring out two trays and set them here, on this table." He pointed to the stone table and two chairs that stood there still. "They take their tisana here after dinner," he continued, "day after day; always the same."

He paused and touched the chair with his hand. A sense of oppression grew upon me. It was cool in the quadrangle, cold almost as a grave, and yet the air was stagnant like the shuttered rooms before he opened them.

I thought of Ambrose as he had been at home. He would walk about the grounds in summertime without a coat, an old straw hat upon his head against the sun. I could see the hat now, tilted forward over his face, and I could see him, his shirt sleeves rolled above the elbow, standing in his boat, pointing at something far away at sea. I remembered how he would reach down with his long arms and pull me into the boat when I swam alongside.

"Yes," said the man, as though speaking to himself, "the Signor Ashley sat in the chair here, looking at the water."

The woman came back and, crossing the quadrangle, turned the handle. The dripping ceased. The bronze boy looked down at an empty shell. Everything was silent, still. The child, who had stared with round eyes at the fountain, bent suddenly to the ground and began grubbing amongst the paving stones, picking up the laburnum pods in his small hands and throwing them into the pool. The woman scolded him, pushing him back against the wall, and, seizing a broom that stood there, began to sweep the court. Her action broke the stillness, and her husband touched my arm.

"Do you wish to see the room where the signore died?" he said softly.

Possessed with the same sense of unreality, I followed him up the wide stairway to the landing above. We passed through rooms more sparsely furnished than the apartments below, and one, looking northwards over the avenue of cypress trees, was plain and bare like a monk's cell. A simple iron bedstead was pushed against the wall. There was a pitcher, a ewer, and a screen beside the bed.

Tapestries hung over the fireplace, and in a niche in the wall was the small statuette of a kneeling Madonna, her hands clasped in prayer.

I looked at the bed. The blankets were folded neatly at the foot. Two pillows, stripped of their linen, were placed on top of one another at the head.

"The end," said the man in a hushed voice, "was very sudden, you understand. He was weak, yes, very weak from the fever, but even the day before he had dragged himself down to sit by the fountain. No, no, said the con-tessa, you will become more ill, you must rest, but he is very obstinate, he will not listen to her. And there is coming and going all the time with the doctors. Signor Rain-aldi, he is here too, talking, persuading, but never will he listen, he shouts, he is violent, and then, like a little child, falls silent. It was pitiful to see a strong man so. Then, in the early morning, the contessa, she comes quickly to my room, calling for me. I was sleeping in the house, signore. She says, her face white as the wall there, "He is dying, Giuseppe, I know it, he is dying," and I follow her to his room, and there he is, lying in bed, his eyes closed, breathing still, but heavily, you understand, not a true sleep. We send away for the doctor, but the Signor Ashley, he never wakes again, it was the coma, the sleep of death. I myself lit the candles with the contessa, and when the nuns had been I came to look at him. The violence had all gone, he had a peaceful face. I wish you could have seen it, signore."

Tears stood in the fellow's eyes. I looked away from him, back to the empty bed. Somehow I felt nothing. The numbness had passed away, leaving me cold and hard.

"What do you mean," I said, "by violence?"

"The violence that came with the fever," said the man. "Twice, three times I had to hold him down in bed after his attacks. And with the violence came the weakness inside, here." He pressed his hand against his stomach. "He suffered much with pain. And when the pain went he would be dazed and heavy, his mind wandering. I tell you, signore, it was pitiful. Pitiful, to see so large a man helpless."

I turned away from that bare room like an empty tomb, and I heard the man close the shutters once again and close the door. "Why was nothing done?" I said. "The doctors, could they not ease the pain? And Mrs. Ashley, did she just let him die?"

He looked puzzled. "Please, signore?" he said.

"What was this illness, how long did it last?" I asked.

"I have told you, at the end, very sudden," said the man, "but one, two attacks before then. And all winter the signore not so well, sad somehow, not himself. Very different from the year before. When the Signor Ashley first came to the villa, he was happy, gay."

He threw open more windows as he spoke, and we walked outside on to a great terrace, spaced here and there with statues. At the far end ran a long stone balustrade. We crossed the terrace and stood by the balustrade, looking down upon a lower garden, clipped and formal, from which the scent of roses came, and summer jasmine, and in the distance was another fountain, and yet another, wide stone steps leading to each garden, the whole laid out, tier upon tier, until at the far end came that same high wall flanked with cypress trees, surrounding the whole property.

We looked westward towards the setting sun, and there was a glow upon the terrace and the hushed gardens; even the statues were held in the one rose-coloured light, and it seemed to me, standing there with my hand upon the balustrade, that a strange serenity had come upon the place that was not there before.

The stone was still warm under my hand, and a lizard ran away from a crevice and wriggled down on to the wall below.

"On a still evening," said the man, standing a pace or so behind me, as though in deference, "it is very beautiful, signore, here in the gardens of the Villa Sangalletti. Sometimes the contessa gave orders for the fountains to be played, and when the moon was full she and the Signor Ashley used to come out on to the terrace here after dinner. Last year, before his illness."

I went on standing there, looking down upon the fountains, and the pools beneath them with the water lilies.

"I think," said the man slowly, "that the contessa will not come back again. Too sad for her. Too many memories. Signer Rainaldi told us that the villa is to be let, possibly sold."

His words jerked me back into reality. The spell of the hushed garden had held me for a brief moment only, the scent of roses and the glow of the setting sun, but it was over now.

"Who is Signer Rainaldi?" I asked.

The man turned back with me towards the villa. "The Signor Rainaldi, he arrange all things for the contessa," he answered, "matters of business, matters of money, many things. He knows the contessa a long time." He frowned, and waved his hand at his wife, who with the child in her arms was walking on the terrace. The sight offended him; it was not right for them to be there. She disappeared within the villa and began fastening the shutters.

"I want to see him, Signor Rainaldi," I said.

"I give you his address," he answered. "He speak English very well."

We went back into the villa, and as I passed through the rooms to the hall the shutters were closed, one by one, behind me. I felt in my pockets for some money. I might have been anyone, a casual traveller upon the continent, visiting a villa from curiosity with a view to purchase. Not myself. Not looking for the first and last time on the place where Ambrose had lived and died.

"Thank you for all you did for Mr. Ashley," I said, putting the coins into the fellow's hand.

Once again the tears came into his eyes. "I am so sorry, signore," he said, "so very sorry."

The last shutters were closed. The woman and the child stood beside us in the hall, and the archway to the empty rooms beyond and to the stairway grew dark again, like the entrance to a vault.

"What happened to his clothes," I asked, "his belongings, his books, his papers?"

The man looked troubled. He turned to his wife, and they spoke to one another for a moment. Questions and answers passed between them. Her face went blank; she shrugged her shoulders.

"Signore," said the man, "my wife gave some help to the contessa when she went away. But she says the contessa took everything. All the Signor Ashley's clothes were put in a big trunk, all his books; everything was packed. Nothing left behind."

I looked into both their eyes. They did not falter. I knew they were speaking the truth. "And you have no idea," I asked, "where Mrs. Ashley went?"

The man shook his head. "She has left Florence, that is all we know," he said. "The day after the funeral the contessa went away."

He opened the heavy front door and I stepped outside.

"Where is he buried?" I asked, impersonal, a stranger.

"In Florence, signore, in the new Protestant cemetery. Many English buried there. Signor Ashley, he is not alone."

It was as if he wished to reassure me that Ambrose would have company, and that in the dark world beyond the grave his own countrymen would bring him consolation.

For the first time I could not bear to meet the fellow's eyes. They were like a dog's eyes, honest and devoted.

I turned away, and as I did so I heard the woman exclaim suddenly to her husband, and before he had time to shut the door she had darted back into the villa once again and opened a great oak chest that was standing against the wall. She came back carrying something in her hand which she gave to her husband, and he in turn to me. His puckered face relaxed, broadening to relief.

"The contessa," he said, "one thing she has forgotten. Take it with you, signore, it is for you alone."

It was Ambrose's hat, wide-brimmed and bent. The hat that he used to wear at home against the sun. It would never fit any other man, it was too big. I could feel their anxious eyes upon me, waiting for me to say something as I turned the hat over and over in my hands.

CHAPTER V

I remember nothing of the return drive to Florence except that the sun had set and it grew quickly dark. There was no twilight as we had at home. From the ditches by the wayside insects, crickets maybe, set up their monotonous chanting, and now and again barefooted peasants passed us, carrying baskets on their backs.

When we came into the city we lost the cooler, cleaner air of the surrounding hills, and it was hot once more. Not like the daytime, burning and dusty white, but the flat stale heat of evening, buried too many hours in the walls and roofs of houses. The lassitude of noon and the activity of those hours between siesta and sunset had given place to a deeper animation, more alive, more tense. The men and women who thronged the piazzas and the narrow streets strolled with another purpose, as if all day they had lain hidden, sleeping, in their silent houses, and now came out like cats to prowl the town. The market stalls were lit by flares and candles and besieged by customers delving with questing hands amongst the proffered goods. Shawled women pressed one another, chattering, scolding, and vendors shouted their wares to make their voices heard. The clanging bells began again, and it seemed to me this time that their clamour was more personal. The doors of the churches were pushed open, so that I could see the candlelight within, and the groups of people broke up a little, scattered, and pressed inside at the summons of the bells.

I paid off my driver in the piazza by the cathedral, and the sound of that great bell, compelling, insistent, rang like a challenge in the still and vapid air. Scarcely aware of what I did, I passed into the cathedral with the people and, straining my eyes into the gloom, stood for a brief moment by a column. An old lame peasant stood beside me, leaning on a crutch. He turned one sightless eye towards the altar, his lips moving, his hands trembling, while about me and before me knelt women, shawled and secret, intoning with shrill voices after the priest, their gnarled hands busy with their beads.

I still held Ambrose's hat in my left hand, and as I stood there in the great cathedral, dwarfed into insignificance, a stranger in that city of cold beauty and spilt blood, seeing the priest's obeisance to the altar, hearing his lips intone words, centuries old and solemn, that I could not understand, I realised suddenly and sharply the full measure of my loss. Ambrose was dead. I would never see him again. He was gone from me forever. Nevermore that smile, that chuckle, those hands upon my shoulder. Nevermore his strength, his understanding. Nevermore that known figure, honoured and loved, hunched in his library chair, or standing, leaning on his stick, looking down towards the sea. I thought of the bare room where he had died in the Villa Sangalletti, and of the Madonna in her niche; and something told me that when he went he was not part of that room, or of that house, or of this country, but that his spirit went back where it belonged, to be amongst his own hills and his own woods, in the garden that he loved, within sound of the sea.

I turned and went out of the cathedral and on to the piazza, and looking up at the great dome and the tower beside me, remote and slender, carved against the sky, I remembered for the first time, with the sudden recollection that comes after great shock and stress, that I had not eaten for the day. I turned my thoughts away from the dead, back to the living; and having found a place to eat and drink, close to the cathedral, I went, with hunger satisfied, in search of Signer Rainaldi. The good servant at the villa had written down his address for me, and after one or two enquiries, pointing at the piece of paper and struggling lamely with the pronunciation, I found his house, over the bridge from my hostelry, on the left bank of the Arno. This side of the river was darker and more silent than in the heart of Florence. Few people wandered in the streets. Doors were closed and windows shuttered. Even my footsteps sounded hollow on the cobblestones.

I came at last to the house and rang the bell. A servant opened the door within a moment and, without enquiring my name, led me upstairs and along a passage and, knocking upon a door, showed me into a room. I stood blinking at the sudden light, and saw a man seated in a chair beside a table, looking through a pile of papers. He rose as I came into the room, and stared at me. He was a little less than my own height and of some forty years perhaps, with a pale, almost colourless face and lean, aquiline features. There was something proud, disdainful about his cast of countenance, like that of someone who would have small mercy for fools, or for his enemies; but I think I noticed most his eyes, dark and deep-set, which at first sight of me startled into a flash of recognition that in one second vanished.

"Signor Rainaldi?" I said. "My name is Ashley. Philip Ashley."

"Yes," he said. "Will you sit down?"

His voice had a cold hard quality, and his Italian accent was not strongly marked. He pushed forward a chair for me.

"You are surprised to see me, no doubt?" I said, watching him carefully. "You were not aware I was in Florence?"

"No," he answered. "No, I was not aware that you were here."

The words were guarded, but it may have been that his command of the English language was small, so that he spoke carefully.

"You know who I am?" I asked.

"I think I am clear as to the exact relationship," he said. "You are cousin, are you not, or nephew to the late Ambrose Ashley?"

"Cousin," I said, "and heir."

He took up a pen between his fingers and tapped with it on the table, as if he were playing for time, or for distraction.

"I have been to the Villa Sangalletti," I said. "I have seen the room where he died. The servant Giuseppe was very helpful. He gave me all the details but referred me to you."

Was it my fancy, or did a veiled look come over those dark eyes?

"How long have you been in Florence?" he asked.

"A few hours. Since afternoon."

"You have only arrived today? Then your cousin Rachel has not seen you." The hand that held the pen relaxed.

"No," I said, "the servant at the villa gave me to understand that she had left Florence the day after the funeral."

"She left the Villa Sangalletti," he said, "she did not leave Florence."

"Is she still here in the city?"

"No," he said, "no, she has now gone away. She wishes me to let the villa. Sell it, possibly."

His manner was oddly stiff and unbending, as if any information that he gave me must be considered first and sorted in his mind.

"Do you know where she is now?" I asked.

"I am afraid not," he said. "She left very suddenly; she had made no plans. She told me she would write when she had come to some decision about the future."

"She is with friends, perhaps?" I ventured.

"Perhaps," he said. "I do not think so."

I had the feeling that only today, or even yesterday, she had been with him in this room, that he knew much more than he admitted.

"You will understand, Signor Rainaldi," I said, "that this sudden hearing of my cousin's death, from the lips of servants, was a very great shock to me. The whole thing has been like a nightmare. What happened? Why was I not informed that he was ill?"

He watched me carefully; he did not take his eyes from my face. "Your cousin's death was sudden too," he said; "it was a great shock to us all. He had been ill, yes, but not, as we thought, dangerously so. The usual fever that attacks many foreigners here in the summer had brought about a certain weakness, and he complained, too, of a violent headache. The contessa — I should say Mrs. Ashley — was much concerned, but he was not an easy patient. He took an instant dislike to our doctors, for what reason it was hard to discover. Every day Mrs. Ashley hoped for some improvement, and certainly she had no desire to make you and his friends in England anxious."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14